


a momentary lapse of reason

by chrofeather



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Angst and Feels, Cardassians with tails because I said so, Cloacal Sex, Drunken Shenanigans, Feelings, Garak's many issues with intimacy, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Regret, poor decision making
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:42:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26170612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrofeather/pseuds/chrofeather
Summary: Exile has made Garak weak. He knows it.Right now, he doesn’t care.
Relationships: Dukat/Elim Garak, Julian Bashir/Elim Garak (one-sided)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	a momentary lapse of reason

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be porn, but somehow it came out sad instead of horny. I was just thinking about how lonely Garak must be on the station because everyone (aside from Julian) either openly dislikes him or keeps him at arm's length. And given what the rest of his life has been like, I imagine at some point that he would crave companionship, especially after his relationship with Julian appears to become somewhat more distant in canon. So, this is the result!
> 
> Title comes from the Pink Floyd album of the same name. 
> 
> I'd love to know what you think!!

Garak was aware that people were staring. 

It was unusual for him to be at the bar, he knew, although it was rather rude for all of them to be so obvious about their goggling. Sure, he didn’t come to Quark’s very often, and certainly not to sit alone at the bar and brood over his kanar, but Garak was in a bit of a mood today. He thought that perhaps a drink would take the edge off.

What passed for kanar at Quark’s bar was swill by Garak’s standards, but it was still kanar. Something familiar, at least. No one had stepped on his tail tonight, so that was a plus. 

How far he had fallen, Garak mused bitterly. To go from one of the most feared operatives of the Obsidian Order to a lowly tailor living on a ramshackle space station, being side-eyed by a bunch of Bajorans and Federation swine. It made Garak wish that Doctor Bashir had never removed the wire from his brain, even if it was ultimately killing him. 

Ah, Doctor Bashir. Intelligent, as humans went, and more clever than the usual Federation types, but still he was about as perceptive as a regnar in an art museum. Garak was getting nowhere with him, unfortunately. If the good doctor were Cardassian, the arguments and lively debates they had each week at the Replimat could only be shameless flirting. But Bashir was human, and as such Garak knew he was likely oblivious to the implications of his actions in the Cardassian sense. Garak had tried almost every trick in the book, from escalating their playful debates into existential quandaries about their personal allegiances, to suggesting daringly erotic literature for their weekly readings. (Which had, of course, gone straight over Bashir’s head. Apparently the metaphor of the spear and the heart and the ‘mourning cries of the Blind Moon’ were too much for him, despite the almost crass ubiquity of the reference on Cardassia.) 

Garak had even tried wearing the most scandalous, revealing clothes he owned, putting his neck ridges and even his chula on display in a way that would be outrageous for any but a courtesan on Prime. And yet, not a lick of interest on Bashir’s part. Garak was starting to think the man simply didn’t find him attractive, despite Bashir’s known xenophilic tendencies.

Oh, well. He wouldn’t be the first. It wasn’t like Garak was looking to be serious with him, anyway. And judging by the way Bashir fawned over that Bajoran dabo girl, he was a hopeless fool, full of besotted sentiment. Hardly what Garak needed in his life. 

He drained his glass of sour, poorly aged kanar and set the glass down on the bar, closing his eyes momentarily and wishing he could drown out the raucous laughter from further down the bar. 

It had to be tonight of all nights that Dukat and his crew had come to drink at the bar, likely waiting on repairs of their ship, that ridiculous Klingon bird-of-prey they’d stolen and were now using to wage a one-ship war against the Klingons. Revenge for the invasion of Cardassia, Garak supposed. Not much else to do when Central Command had made it clear you weren’t welcome within a light year of Prime. 

The whole lot of them, perhaps a dozen, were clearly in a good mood, and spiritedly drunk. Damar was in the midst of retelling some story, likely the tale of their latest victory over some unlucky Klingon patrol ship, though at one point he paused mid-sentence to let out a long, loud belch. This was met with uproarious laughter from the rest of the crew, and even the humans nearby were chuckling. The Bajorans didn’t seem amused, but that was hardly surprising.

Garak had spotted Dukat not too far away, his posture loose and relaxed in a way that indicated he was already a few drinks in. He seemed to be in a good mood, grinning and laughing with his men, a glass of kanar in one hand. Garak resisted the urge to make a cutting remark to Morn, who was sitting a few seats down, if only because it was always impossible to shut him up once you began a conversation. 

Quark must have seen Garak looking at the gaggle of Cardassians. “Why don’t you go over there and catch up?” the Ferengi suggested as he was wiping a glass, tipping his head towards the other end of the bar.

Garak gave him a purposefully unsettling smile, just to see him squirm uncomfortably on his feet. “We aren’t friends,” was all he said, with just enough of an edge to disinvite further questions. 

“Okay, okay,” said Quark with a snort, eyebrows going up. He looked pointedly in Garak’s direction as he replaced the glass on a nearby shelf. “I know I say Cardassians are bad for business, but at least  _ they’re _ buying drinks.”

“Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?” Garak asked with a raised brow-ridge. He nodded toward a very drunk Damar standing on the bar, exuberantly reciting from  _ The Never-Ending Sacrifice _ . His tail lashed back and forth with vigor and shattered a glass on a nearby shelf, causing Quark to wince.

The Ferengi hurried over to the other end of the bar to shoo Damar off, while the other Cardassians just laughed and carried on with their conversations.

That was, of course, when Garak was greeted by the person he least wanted to see that night.

Dukat sat down in the seat next to Garak, his tail brushing Garak’s momentarily in a gesture so casual (and overly familiar) that Garak couldn’t help but stiffen in surprise. 

“Garak, my old friend,” Dukat practically purred, pupils wide in the low light. It was technically night-time on the station now, and the lights were turned down accordingly--even more so in the smoky atmosphere of Quark’s. “It’s been too long. I never thought I’d see you here again.”

At first Garak was a bit flabbergasted. It was not the greeting he’d been expecting after the last time they met. Of course, Dukat was already well into his cups, so Garak reasoned that he probably shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps he would just play along for now. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to stop by to talk.

“And just where did you think I’d be?” Garak responded after only a heartbeat’s pause, ever so slightly haughtier than was appropriate. “I suppose I missed the last transport out after the end of the Occupation.” It was a probing jibe, a test of the waters. If Dukat took the bait, they’d argue. If not, then he probably felt he had the upper hand somehow, and Garak would have to find out why.

But Dukat did not become irritated, nor did he argue with Garak’s implication about his (mis)handling of the occupation. Instead, he just grinned. His tail swished behind him in a rhythm that a sober Cardassian would consider uncouth. 

“You haven’t lost any of your charm, have you, Garak?” he said at last, letting out a lazy chuckle. 

Now Garak was truly intrigued. “What’s the occasion that you’re in such high spirits?” he asked with just enough of an edge that it wouldn’t seem like he was really asking. “I would think that being told not to come back to Prime after your bumbling of the Maquis incident wouldn’t be cause for celebration.”

Dukat raised an orbital ridge. “I think that living among these Federation types has slowed you down, Garak. I’m surprised you haven’t heard,” he said with clear satisfaction, gesturing to the rest of the bar. “We’ve taken out half a dozen Klingon ships in this sector in the last two weeks alone. That, I think, is cause for celebration.”

Garak resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He had heard, all right. Several times over the past hour, from varying members of Dukat’s crew, who were eager to tell the stories to anyone who would listen. Loudly. Cardassians as a general rule didn’t hear terribly well, but they certainly knew how to make their voices project. 

“And here I thought you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself without the entire Second Order at your beck and call, in case you got in over your head with those Klingons,” Garak remarked cuttingly, feeling a twinge of irritation. It was childish, he knew, but Dukat was usually so easy to bait. Perhaps he really was losing his edge, Garak thought bitterly.

Dukat sat back in his seat, touched his chest and swept his tail close in a melodramatic gesture. “Truly, you wound me, Garak,” he drawled sarcastically.

Quark was passing by, and Dukat slapped the surface of the bar with one hand, his attention momentarily drawn away from Garak. “Ferengi, another round for me and my friend here,” he ordered.

Garak was starting to get a headache, and he wasn’t even drunk yet.

Quark glanced dubiously between the two of them. “Yes, sir,” he said with a cheeky sort of smirk that would have displeased Dukat, had he been slightly more sober, Garak thought. 

Honestly, Garak found the Ferengi’s implication crass. He stood up abruptly from the bar. “You must excuse me, but I have far better ways to waste my time than this,” he said with a thin smile. 

He could feel Dukat’s eyes on him, and some part of Garak hated to turn his back on the man. It felt dangerous. And it was. But that was part of the appeal.

“My dear Garak,” said Dukat in his mellifluous baritone, and Garak hated the prickle he felt under his scales at the sound of his name spoken so fondly, so mockingly. “Leaving so soon? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were running away. Am I so intimidating?”

Garak stopped after two steps. Normally such taunts didn’t bother him; he put up with far worse here on the station on a near-daily basis, but Dukat had an infuriating talent for getting under people’s skin. 

A talent, Garak had liked to think, that he was immune to these days.

Perhaps it was the two glasses of kanar he’d already had. Yes, that had to be it. That was what made it easier to turn around and face Dukat and, with impetuous vigor, drain the glass of kanar that had been placed at his now-empty spot at the bar. It took a few swallows, and Garak’s head felt light by the time he got to the end of it, his throat feeling scorched. This did not taste like what he had been drinking before.

All the better, he thought. 

He sat down in his seat a bit more heavily than intended and stared Dukat in the eyes, an obvious challenge. That, and his throat felt too raw to speak at the moment.

Dukat’s orbital ridges went up in surprise. “Well. Let no one say you never rise to a challenge,” he said as he lifted his own glass and took a delicate sip. 

Garak felt hot with irritation under his scales. “You are…  _ insufferable, _ ” he managed at last, grasping for words, feeling uncharacteristically clumsy. It reminded him of when they’d first met, when they were young, and the memory threatened to swallow him whole. 

Dukat grinned wide enough to show his sharp canines. “I do have that effect on people,” he practically purred. The bastard knew what he was doing. Despite his incessant posturing and his generally ostentatious demeanor, he was dangerous. More so than he let on. More so than he knew. 

Garak had been a big fish in a little pond for so long, here on Deep Space Nine, that he had nearly forgotten what it was like to be so evenly matched, forgotten the dizzying speed of repartee with which his own people communicated. He was used to having to slow down and clarify, to explain as though to a child, in order to work with these embarrassingly literal Starfleet types. He swallowed, throat still raw.

Tain had been right. 

He was weak. He’d let his guard down, surrounded by these seemingly weak and simple humans. A probe’s mistake. 

And now he found himself unbalanced, disarmed, at the point of another’s verbal spear, in ways he hadn’t been in a very long time. Dukat, one. Garak, zero. He wondered if Dukat would simply let it go, a gracious social gesture and the start of another round, or if he would drive the spear in deeper. 

As it turned out, Dukat had a third option in mind. 

The kanar had quite gone to Garak’s head, so his reaction time was rather delayed when Dukat placed a hand on Garak’s shoulder and leaned in to kiss him, languorous but intense. It wasn’t something Cardassians typically did, but of course Dukat had always had a penchant for strange alien sexual practices. It explained a lot about his record of… indiscretions, at least in Garak’s mind. 

Wolf whistles and cheers went up from the other end of the bar, but Garak barely heard them.

It crossed his mind to pull away, to get up and leave before he could be humiliated any further, but the sensation of a warm mouth on his, a familiar touch, was such a rare pleasure. Somehow, he couldn’t find a reason to deny himself that.

Garak was already the subject of the station’s gossip mill most days. People talked, and it was consistently less than flattering. Let them talk, he thought. Perhaps this would give them something worth talking about. 

He kissed Dukat with a fervor that surprised even himself, parting his lips so their tongues could meet. It had to be the kanar, he thought. That was the reason this was so… satisfying. Garak felt Dukat’s hand slide up to massage his neck ridge and couldn’t suppress a shiver. It had been so long since anyone touched him there that the sensation was nearly overwhelming, the desire like a tidal wave that was quickly overtaking his rational thought process.

Finally Dukat broke away and grinned at him. Garak was satisfied, in some small way, to see that the two of them were equally out of breath. 

“Perhaps we should go somewhere a bit more… quiet,” Dukat mused as his thumb stroked Garak’s auricular ridge, fingers pressing into the curve of a neck ridge. There was a hunger that darkened his gaze, a predatory gleam echoed by his posture, and it stirred something deep and dark in Garak. 

Before he could think too much about it, Garak stood up and led the way without a word, their exit heralded by fading drunken cheers of Cardassians and humans alike. 

—

It was perhaps a mistake bringing Dukat to his quarters, an invitation he did not want to extend, but Garak wasn’t keen on being interrupted by Constable Odo and arrested for public indecency. Besides, neither of them were as young as they used to be, and the days of fucking in storage closets or disused conference rooms were long past. Garak’s knees protested the very idea. 

Garak didn’t quite realize how inebriated he was until the door shut behind them, and they were left in the quiet of his quarters. The noise of the bar still seemed to ring in his ears in the silence, feeling fuzzy and sort of lightheaded. What in the world was he  _ doing? _

But then Dukat was pushing him up against the wall, their bodies pressed flush together, tails twining, and nosing at Garak’s neck in a way that felt quite nice. “Shall I take you right here?” he rumbled, and Garak felt the growl deep in his chest. “Your scent tells me you’re quite ready.”

“Absolutely not,” Garak grumbled, pushing at Dukat’s shoulder with halfhearted force. No patience whatsoever. Some things never changed. “We are doing this in the bed or not at all. Some of us have…what is it?  _ Taste _ , you know.” Stars, he was even forgetting words in Kardasi now. Had he been speaking Standard for so long? 

He was even thinking in Standard these days. It was an effort to switch back to Kardasi. 

It felt like coming home, whatever that meant. Probably the closest to home Garak would ever get.

It was why he let himself be pushed backwards onto the bed, letting himself drift in the haze of kanar clouding his brain and letting him forget, for a while, that he was in hell. Garak didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until he heard Dukat’s heavy cuirass hit the floor, quickly followed by his boots and his tunic. 

To Garak’s surprise, someone had undone the buttons on the front of his tunic, leaving his soft belly exposed. He was thicker about the middle than he used to be, but Dukat didn’t seem to mind, his hands roving over Garak’s ample stomach with evident satisfaction. 

“I must be losing my touch if you’re falling asleep,” Dukat remarked from above him.

Garak pried his eyes open and took in the sight of their bodies so close, their coloration similar enough to nearly flow into one another in a mobius strip of limbs and tails. If he let his vision blur and unfocus, it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. 

“You can’t lose what you never had,” Garak returned, satisfied by the narrowing of Dukat’s eyes and the irritable twitch of his tail. 

Dukat snorted. “You always were so smug, Elim. Now will you take your damn clothes off?”

“You’ll have to get off of me first.”

Dukat looked vaguely surprised, like this had just occurred to him, but he acquiesced and stood at the foot of the bed in all his lean, pale-dawn-colored glory. Garak was glad, at least, that their judgment was similarly impaired. Plausible deniability was important, even now. 

Garak sat up, feeling a tad ungraceful, and managed to divest himself of his tunic and his pants, both of which he insisted on folding into a neat(ish) pile next to the bed. They would wrinkle if he didn’t, he explained to an impatient Dukat. 

There was a time when Garak would have put up a struggle, made Dukat work for his victory, made them both bleed for it. But this dance was a familiar one, and they were long past the antagonistic heat of a youthful courtship. This was a rhythm their bodies remembered; the bites and hisses and scrape of scales almost ritual. It had been so long. 

It wasn’t the same. It never could be, Garak knew. The hate that ran between them was deep, owing to circumstances that no longer bore any merit to debate, but for their people, love and hate were dangerously close. Two masks worn by the same face, as the saying went in Kardasi. 

At first, Garak had sworn that it would only happen once. 

The first time could be excused as a drunken mistake, a dalliance that could be dismissed as a mere slaking of lust. On Cardassia, there were no such simple reductions as love and hate. No, there was only passion and lack thereof, and regardless of the polarity, such passion, particularly between such… spirited individuals, was bound to create sparks. Monogamy was one of those didactic values of the State that was publicly respected, and simultaneously thrown to the four winds behind closed doors. Part of the never-ending sacrifice they were all expected to make. 

Garak had been prepared to make that sacrifice. His whole life had been devoted to Cardassia, to its people, to the protection of the world he’d grown up simultaneously apart from and inside. And what did he have to show for it now? He loved Cardassia, but it did not love him. The State was a lover who demanded much and gave little in return. Honor. Duty. Discipline. They were to Garak as baubles to a starving man. He was born to sacrifice, as all his people were, and he had been willing. His blood, his flesh, his name, his dreams, his desires.

He had nothing left to give. 

He had to reach out and  _ take _ , before he shattered and faded away into nothing. 

Oh, he was weak, and he knew it. But when he let Dukat inside him, buried to the hilt with a muttered curse to gods long dead, Garak felt alive again. How long had it been since he had been so close to someone, least of all a member of his own kind? His blunted claws scraped at Dukat’s shoulder ridges, as though to draw him in closer with each thrust. 

Dukat’s teeth dug into Garak's neck ridge, not quite hard enough to pierce and draw blood, and the pain combined with pleasure made stars burst in Garak’s vision. Garak’s cock throbbed with want of attention, but Garak was busy dragging his claws down Dukat’s back, feeling his fingers catch on scars and the occasional scale ready to shed. 

Garak’s tail lashed when Dukat thrust in deep enough to nudge the erectile tissues of his cock from inside, a pleasure that made the ridges at the base of his cock bloom and throb. A shaky moan bounced off the walls, and Garak realized it was himself a second later. He felt rather than heard the pleased rumble in Dukat’s chest, and if Dukat was speaking, Garak couldn’t hear him over the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and the rhythm of their bodies against one another. 

Garak’s orgasm nearly took him by surprise, and he shuddered through the tidal wave of pleasure, digging his heel into Dukat’s back on pure instinct as he arched his back and cried out something unintelligible even to his own ears.

He barely registered the fact that Dukat finished inside him at some point--it could have been minutes or seconds or hours, but Garak simply lay there in a comfortable, distant haze. 

Dukat lay down next to him after a while, saying something that Garak didn’t bother to listen to. He felt the warmth of that familiar lean frame against him. It was enough. 

It had to be. 

  
  



End file.
